/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package com.mlizhi.base.codec;


/**
 * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.
 * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}.  All
 * Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p>
 * 
 * <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder 
 * implementation in the codec package.</p>
 * 
 * <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p>
 * 
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 797690 2009-07-24 23:28:35Z ggregory $
 */
public interface Decoder {

/**
 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded"
 * Object.  Note that the implementation of this
 * interface will try to cast the Object parameter
 * to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder
 * implementation.  If a {@link ClassCastException} occurs
 * this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
 * 
 * @param pObject an object to "decode"
 * 
 * @return a 'decoded" object
 * 
 * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can
 * be thrown for any number of reasons.  Some good
 * candidates are that the parameter passed to this
 * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the
 * appropriate type for a specific encoder.
 */
Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException;
}  

